Abstract
Theatre in early modern England has for some time been recognized as a crucial form of cultural exchange. It not only expresses but also inquires into and mediates between different types of social performativity, thus cutting across the boundaries of institutional discourses. This essay will focus on the dialogue between theatre and the law, emphasizing both the historical and structural dimensions of this exchange. The notion of equity — painstaking inquiry and fair judgement in consideration of the particular circumstances of a case — emerges as a privileged point of contact between the court and the stage.1 While equity appears as a crucial and contentious subject of contemporary legal debate, drama deals in the particular and unusual, and seeks to interrogate the ethics and the complexity of social interaction. The most complex cases in a patriarchal society often involve women, and John Webster perhaps more than any other contemporary playwright used the stage to explore the relation between women and the law. I will argue that his is a type of forensic drama which foregrounds equity by placing the issues of female characters at the centre of the action — as the law interrogates femininity, femininity interrogates the law.
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Notes
I use the notion of equity, or epieikeia, in the Aristotelian sense that was prominent in the early modern legal debate. Equity is needed to supplement law, which must necessarily be general and therefore cannot include individual circumstances. As such, equity creates a justice that goes beyond the letter of the law, and it should be applied in every branch of jurisdiction. Due to the influence of Thomas Aquinas, the canon law notion of equity is associated with the Christian concept of charity, or misericordia. Both concepts are related to, but not identical with the discretion of the judge within prerogative jurisdiction, especially the Court of Chancery. In later times, equity principally came to denote a technical aspect of the Chancery jurisdiction. On this aspect see W. Ashburner, Principles of Equity (Butterworth, 1902). On the legal history of equity see P. Vinogradoff, Outlines of Historical Jurisprudence (Oxford University Press, 1922); M. Hamburger, Morals and Law: the Growth of Aristotle’s Legal Theory (Yale University Press, 1951); C. St. Germain, Doctor and Student, eds T.F.T. Plucknett and J.L. Barton (Selden Society, 1974); J.H. Baker, The Reports of Sir John Spelman (Selden Society, 1978). On equity in the context of literature see the excellent overview by T. Ziolkowski, The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal Crises (Princeton University Press, 1997); K. Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition (Yale University Press, 1997).
D. Goldberg, Between Worlds: a Study of the Plays of John Webster (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1987), 11.
For theatrical activities at the Inns of Court see A. Wigfall Green, The Inns of Court and Early English Drama (Benjamin Blom, 1965) (1st edition 1931); P.J. Finkelpearl, John Marston of the Middle Temple. An Elizabethan Dramatist and his Social Setting (Harvard University Press, 1969); J.H. Baker, Readings and Moots at the Inns of Court in the Fifteenth Century, vol. II: Moots and Reader’s Cases (Selden Society, 1990). The prominence of court-room drama in modern cinema testifies to the affinity of public entertainment and legal procedure.
H.G. Harvey, The Theatre of the Basoche: the Contribution of the Law Societies to French Mediaeval Comedy (Harvard University Press, 1941), 12, 14, 19. My thinking in this matter was greatly helped by Stephanie Lysyk’s paper, ‘Basoche Theatricality: Theatre and Law in Early Modern France’, given at the Renaissance, Law and Literature conference held at Oxford in July 1998, convened by the editors of the present volume.
J.B. Altman, TheTudorPlay ofMind:RhetoricalInquiry and theDevelopment ofElizabethanDrama (University of California Press, 1978), 390.
Ibid.
Muriel C. Bradbrook, John Webster: Citizen and Dramatist (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), 45–6.
See M. Heinemann, ‘Political Drama’, in A.R. Braunmuller and M. Hattaway (eds), The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama (Cambridge University Press, 1990) 177.
On women and the law in early modern England see M. Cioni, Women and Law in Elizabethan England with Particular Reference to the Court of Chancery (Garland, 1985); M.J. Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge University Press, 1987); L. Boose, ‘Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman’s Unruly Member’, Shakespeare Quarterly 42:2 (1991), 179–213; A.L. Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (Routledge, 1993); F.E. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England (Cornell University Press, 1994); J. Kermode and G. Walker (eds), Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (UCL Press, 1994); L. Gowing, Domestic Dangers. Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Clarendon Press, 1996); T. Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
On the legal history of defamation see for example J.H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History, 3rd edition (Butterworths, 1990); R.H. Helmholz (ed.), Select Cases on Defamation to 1600, Publications of the Selden Society 10 (Selden Society, 1985); the same author’s Roman Canon Law in Reformation England (Cambridge University Press, 1990); Gowing, Domestic Dangers.
For a discussion of this play see A. Kusunoki, ‘A Study of The Devil’s Law-Case: with Special Reference to the Controversy over Women’, Shakespeare Studies, The Shakespeare Society of Japan, 21 (1982–3), 1–33. Kusunoki draws attention to powerful women’s involvement in law cases of the Jacobean period. Quotations from Webster’s plays will be taken from the following edition: Rene Weis (ed.), The Duchess of Malfi and Other Plays (Oxford University Press, 1996).
On Webster’s source for this see D. Carnegie, ‘Selden’s Duello as a Source for Webster’s The Devil’s Law Case’, Notes & Queries 46 [244:2] (1999), 260–2. Carnegie refers to John Selden’s ‘antiquarian handbook’ The Duello, or Single Combat (1610). For a discussion of alternative theatrical jurisdictions related to the chivalric code of honour see P. Goodrich, Law in the Courts of Love. Literature and Other Minor Jurisprudences (Routledge, 1996).
D. Kezar, Guilty Creatures: Renaissance Poetry and the Ethics of Authorship (Oxford University Press, 2001), 88. The antitheatrical text Kezar mainly draws on in this context is Stephen Gosson’s Playes Confuted in Five Actions (1590?); see also his The School ofAbuse (1579).
C. Luckyj, A Winter’s Snake: Dramatic Form in the Tragedies of John Webster (The University of Georgia Press, 1989), 114.
K.R. Finin-Farber, ‘Framing (the) Woman: The White Devil and the Deployment of Law’, Renaissance Drama 25 (1994), 221. As regards language, Finin-Farber draws on Patricia Parker’s seminal study Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (Methuen, 1987). See also G. Greene, ‘Women on Trial in Shakespeare and Webster: “The Mettle of (Their) Sex”’, Topic: A Journal of the Liberal Arts 36 (1982), 5–19.
Ibid., 231.
Ibid., 235.
Ibid., 233.
Quoted from C. Bowen, The Lion and the Throne (Little, Brown, 1957), 360.
For similarities between these characters see also Bradbrook, John Webster, 158; E.C. Bartels, ‘Strategies of Submission: Desdemona, the Duchess, and the Assertion of Desire’, Studies in English Literature 36 (1996), 417–33.
For the relationship between authorship and femininity see L. Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (Routledge, 1994).
For an excellent discussion of the metaphysical dimension of the play see M.C. Bradbrook, ‘Fate and Chance in The Duchess of Malfi’, in N. Rabkin (ed.), Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘The Duchess of Malfi’ (Prentice Hall, 1968), 27–40.
The relationship between inwardness and public display is discussed in K. Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 1995).
A. Henderson, ‘Death on Stage, Death of the Stage: the Antitheatricality of The Duchess of Malfi’, in Dympna Callaghan (ed.), The Duchess of Malfi, New Casebooks (Macmillan, 2000), 64. The essay was first published in Theatre Journal 42 (1990), 194–207.
C. Luckyj, ‘Gender, Rhetoric, and Performance in John Webster’s The White Devil’, in Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell (eds), Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage (University of Illinois Press, 1999), 219, 229.
On the subject of boy actors in Webster’s tragedies see L.L. Behling, “S/he scandles our proceedings”: the Anxiety of Alternative Sexualities in The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi’, English Language Notes 33:4 (1996), 24–43.
M. de Montaigne, ‘On Experience’ (orig. 1588), The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne (1603), transl. John Florio, vol. 3 (Dent n.d.), 331.
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Habermann, I. (2005). ‘She has that in her belly will dry up your ink’: Femininity as Challenge in the ‘Equitable Drama’ of John Webster. In: Sheen, E., Hutson, L. (eds) Literature, Politics and Law in Renaissance England. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230597662_5
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